VIRTUAL LABORATORY FOR SUPPORT THE LEARNING OF DISTILLATION BASED IN A MOTION CAPTURE DEVICE

Day after day the research designing and developing didactic tools that supported the teaching and learning process of students, it has been developing by economical and academicals supported, principally for the impact that Technologies of the information and communication have been having in education. In this point, it is necessary that the educational material be at the same level with these technologies, offers interactive and innovators scenes that catch the student’s attention and supports the contemporary teaching theories.

Being in this context, we can lay the virtual laboratories, as a new alternative simulators and educative games, which counts whit a scenery in third dimension with some components that conform the laboratory, an interactive device (glove, helmet, dress), which permit to the student get into a virtual world and a movement device that receives the students movement signs inside the virtual world and then give the sign to the computer to be process.

If we approach an important part of the resolution of problems, we observe a phenomenon that happens often and not only in the sciences, and it is that the pupils limit themselves to looking for general formulae that solve always the above mentioned problems, or simply they limit themselves hoping that the teacher solves the problem; this phenomenon creates an act that on having passed the time is complicated to suppress and to be the mechanical accomplishment of the problems, which carries to not understanding of the process that is what is looked, also guide the students on having approached new problems of a systematic and routine way, Creating slightly desirable habits in the student in a world like the science. Some factors that still missed the current learning process on the part of the students are: identification and definition of the problem, to propose procedures, compilation and interpretation of results and capture of decisions. (Mora and García 2004).

With all of this background, it has been designed a virtual laboratory that support the teaching process of distillation chemistry comprises by three principal elements:

• An interaction device, composed by an arm that realizes the movements that it goes to be detected by the apprehension device movement.
• A device of apprehension of movement, composed by devices that detect and capture the movements of the arm and then they send to one electronic interface, entrusted to receive the information and to send it to the computer.
• A software application(virtual world), shaped by the basic elements of a laboratory of distillation inside a scene of three dimensions, which are manipulated in agreement to the information given by the device of apprehension of movement.

The application will develop integrating software for construction of virtual environments in third dimension, signs apprehension programs, programs with special procedures and intelligent agents which allow offering an interactive environment to the users.